Detecting Men: Masculinity and the Hollywood Detective Film

5. Investigating Crisis: The Spectacle of “Musculinity”

125 Investigating Crisis: The Spectacle of “Musculinity” CHANGING TIMES, CHANGING MEN The 1980s witnessed the return to noir aesthetics and themes, but parallel to this trend was that of the action film, and its popularity affected the detective genre, with a proliferation of the cop action hero. The cop action film offered a hybridization of the detective and action film by having a detective as protagonist who investigates a crime, with an emphasis on spectacular action as the way to resolve the case and bring the criminals to justice. Epitomized by Bruce Willis in Die Hard (McTiernan 1988) and Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon (Donner 1987), the cop action hero represented an idealized image of Americanized heroism and masculinity—violent, strong, independent, white, muscular, and victorious. The Vigilante Hero The origins of the 1980s cop action film are in the vigilante cop film of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and its appearance coincided with industrial and social shifts. As Martin Rubin explains, The late 1960s saw a marked increase in the consciousness of violence in America, spurred by such highly visible phenomena as war, urban C H A P T E R F I V E riots, assassinations, political demonstrations, and the suppression of those demonstrations. One manifestation of this consciousness was a quantum leap in the depiction of screen violence. (“Grayness” 54) Changing social factors led to a loosening of Hollywood’s observation of the Production Code since the 1950s, and this increase of consciousness regarding violence in the late 1960s led, in part, to the abolition of the Code by 1968 and its replacement with the ratings system. Thus, films like Bullitt (Yates 1968), Coogan’s Bluff (Siegel 1968), The French Connection (Friedkin 1971), and Dirty Harry (Siegel 1971) appeared on the screen and introduced the tough and often angry hero who annihilated crime at any cost, even to the extent of ignoring or even breaking the law to get the job done. In a period when President Nixon’s hard-line politics on crime and the widespread loss of confidence in law-enforcement were dominating the American psyche, the vigilante cop film presented masculinity that was tough, independent, violent, and successful in the war against crime. The vigilante cop is associated most closely with Clint Eastwood’s Inspector Harry Callahan—“Dirty” Harry.1 Eastwood brought to the detective genre the associations of lawlessness, extreme violence, and toughness that his persona had embodied during his spaghetti Western days, and Harry was, in many ways, a Western hero transplanted onto the city streets. In the cop films of the late 1960s and 1970s, police procedure was shown as impotent in the face of violent and pervasive crime, and only the lone streetwise cop, who understood the nature of the criminal because he was very much like one, could deal with it effectively—most often by defying the rules and restraints of the law. Harry represented a law officer who thought and, more importantly, acted along the same lines as the villains he pursued. As he says in Dirty Harry, he is the man they call to do the “dirty jobs” when no one else can, and he ignores his superiors’ orders and abandons the rules of the force to get the job done. In the final scene of Dirty Harry, after he has dispatched the psychotic serial killer, the hero throws away his badge and walks off alone rather than being recouped back into the force or society. Once before, he had brought the killer, Scorpio, in only to be told that the law could not punish him: the evidence they had against him had been seized without a warrant and was, thus, inadmissible in court. The killer, once loose, goes back to terrorizing society, this time taking a school bus of children hostage. Harry pursues the killer beyond the city boundaries to an abandoned quarry and there confronts and kills Scorpio. His version of justice is exacted outside the boundaries of the law and society but is seen as 126 DETECTING MEN FIGURE 12. Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry. A man in action—in front and behind the camera: Clint Eastwood performs his own stunt for the scene where the hero jumps off the bridge onto a moving bus in Dirty Harry (1971). Photo from author’s collection. necessary when the law is made impotent by bureaucracy. The vigilante hero can be seen as a...